Not too many teenagers can celebrate their 17th birthday with the release of their debut album. But not too many teenagers are as gifted as Muireann Bradley.
The fifth-year student at Abbey Vocational School in Donegal town has just released I Kept These Old Blues on Tompkins Square, the noted American traditional label, to a significant wave of approval – not least from Jools Holland, who was so impressed that he has invited her to appear on this year’s Hootenanny, his New Year’s Eve show on BBC Two.
The label’s founder, Josh Rosenthal, signed Muireann when she was 14, after he came across the young acoustic guitarist on YouTube, and she has been recording solo tracks over the past two years at a local studio.
The music is American prewar country blues, mainly a particularly elegant and complex fingerpicking style called Piedmont blues, from the east and southeastern states, though Muireann is also adept at playing the darker and probably better-known Mississippi Delta blues of the likes of the legendary Robert Johnson.
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But how does a 17-year-old girl from Ballybofey, the eldest of a family of three, become such a whizz in what is increasingly an arcane form of music that one of its elder champions, Stefan Grossman, remarked that she was “a wonderful player. I can now retire: the torch has been passed”? The answer is that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“I grew up listening to my dad. He was really into all that kind of old country blues music,” says Muireann. “And I just grew up listening to him playing and then just him listening to all the old blues guys like Robert Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake. I was kind of fascinated by the playing and how complicated it was, even at a young age.”
She got her first guitar for her ninth birthday. “And the first thing Dad taught me were bluesy versions of nursery rhymes like Three Blind Mice. He got fingerpicking versions of them and that’s kind of how I started off fingerpicking straight away.”
Her dad, John Bradley, takes up the story. “She took it up really easily. She really wanted to learn for a long time but I kept telling her, no, no, you’re too young ... But I’d keep catching her with my guitars on her lap.” So the willing student tapped into her father’s deep knowledge with gusto. “It came really naturally, because she was willing to put in the boring sort of work, to build up the technique.”
But this was more than an academic exercise for father and daughter. For John, the blues have always been a part of his life.
“It makes me think of a different time, a simpler time, without technology,” he says. “I picture the southern states that Elizabeth Cotten sang about, where poor black people lived very simple and very hard lives. It was a time and place without noise apart from trains and horses, and these are the rhythms in the music, along with the rhythms of work gangs and chain gangs and maybe the rhythm of walking on a dusty road.
“There is something in the sound of the voices and guitars that just cuts straight to something deep inside us, I think. There is deep, dark blues, funny, bawdy blues, sorrowful blues and just showy blues that are all about the musicianship.”
While John’s stage fright has stopped him performing in public, he has passed on this love and understanding of country blues to Muireann, sharing stories and songs of his African American heroes and the mostly difficult lives they endured. She understands the context, even if her grasp of historical detail understandably is still a little sketchy.
“I listen to this music every day whether it’s me or Daddy playing it. Listening to Gary Davis or John Hurt is kind of like playing it in my mind. It is really fun to play, and you really get caught up in the rhythm and drive of it, whereas playing Police Dog Blues is almost like taking part in a sport, because it is so technical.
“To pull it off you have to get into almost a kind of flow state, and you don’t always pull it off, while listening to it is just pure fun and joy. It never gets old. Songs like Delia and Frankie, while they have some difficult guitar playing, are more about the story and the emotion of the story, and I think that’s true if I’m listening to the originals or performing them myself.”
Muireann is also alive to more contemporary sounds that she hears with friends. And she also likes Irish traditional music.
“I heard a lot of the Bothy Band growing up, along with Planxty and Paul Brady and Andy Irvine, though I don’t play this stuff myself. I also like some of old country music, such as Hank Williams. I really like a lot of Dolly Parton’s more acoustic songs – the guitar part in Jolene is super fun to play, though obviously I can’t sing it like her.
“I really like [the American roots singer-songwriter] Sierra Ferrell too. She is a great songwriter and does amazing kind of folk country, as well as brilliant covers of early country artists like Kitty Wells.”
She also displays superior taste in her selection of television series. “I have been playing Johnny Flynn’s Detectorists, the theme from my favourite TV show, in some of my sets recently. It is a lovely fingerpicking tune. I love Bob Dylan too, and play a few of his also.” To round off her cultural influences, she has also “been a Beatles fan since I was small”.
As for the long-gone country-blues giants whose music she helps keep alive, they all rank equally in her estimation.
“I don’t think I could choose a favourite. There is so much fun and personality in the voice of Blind Lemon Jefferson I think he would have been a joy to know. But there is something in the toughness of Memphis Minnie that really appeals to the fighter in me.”
As for the future, Muireann is just beginning to play gigs, learning as she goes how to deal with the vicissitudes of public performance. She says her teacher mother is adamant her education will not suffer, and her dad agrees. But the music business runs at its own pace. John Bradley knows this.
“Yes, I definitely worry a lot about everything happening too fast and Muireann being too young,” he says. “I have tried to keep everything at a pace I knew she could easily handle but it is becoming more and more difficult. I don’t think it is really possible to prepare her for something which I have no experience with myself, so we’ll just keep taking one day at a time.”
Jools’ Annual Hootenanny is on BBC Two on New Year’s Eve at 11.30pm. I Kept These Old Blues by Muireann Bradley is released on Tompkins Square Records
